Automatic launched this week

16 Mar 2013

The startup that I've been part of for more than a year has launched this week : Automatic - Your Smart Driving Assistant. It's a hardware device + mobile app + cloud combination that helps you save money by helping you drive in a more fuel-efficient way, monitor your car engine's health, automatic call to local authorities/911 in case of a car crash, and will automatically remember where you parked your car (note that the product is currently USA-only).

So how did I get involved? A couple of years back when I was considering freelancing full-time, Thejo Kote got in touch with me and I got started with NextDrop for which he was one of the co-founders. After some time, I was looking for something more long-term, so I pinged Thejo and he welcomed me to join his new startup.

It was a YCombinator company and was well-funded and I actually liked the idea, although at the time I was skeptical if this is something people will buy, that question has been comprehensively answered by the audience response and media coverage this week. Finally, I'm part of a hardware startup that had a working product before preorder launch :)

It was funny that as we were working on this in stealth, I would see many articles such as:

Cars have been equipped with onboard computers for decades now, but as they get smarter, they remain stubbornly closed off. You might see an miles-per-gallon reading on your dashboard, but there's no way to check it on your phone, and as soon as you finish a trip on an on-board GPS system, it's gone forever. As Automatic CEO Thejo Kote puts it, "your car is the most expensive computer you own." And it's usually a pretty bad one. Naturally, Kote has a plan to fix that.

The most prominent feature is a fuel-efficiency score, designed to nudge you into gas-saving driving habits. Automatic is playing off a Department of Energy report which found that avoiding hard stops, fast starts, and speeding can increase gas mileage by up to 33 percent.

It could be the most practical take so far on what a cloud-connected car should look like — an area that auto-averse startup scene has mostly overlooked. Automatic is working towards a time when users and developers can access a car’s data whenever they want, and use that data to build new features. From there, it's easy to imagine more applications, from parental car-tracking to next-generation traffic apps, but the first step is getting the data off the dashboard. With the app-connector combination, Automotive has set up a remarkably painless way to do it.

The device combines two burgeoning trends—the “Internet of things,” where traditionally offline gadgets are connected to the Internet to amplify their usefulness (see “50 Disruptive Companies 2013: Nest’s Smarter Home”), and the mining of data that’s collected by our devices for meaning (see “Every Step You Take, Tracked Automatically”). By putting these two together, the company thinks it can get users to conserve gas and spend less—and make a profit itself while doing so.

People spend a ton of money on their cars every year, from car payments to insurance to gas to maintenance. But for such expensive assets, most people normally don’t know a whole lot about what’s happening under the hood, or how they can drive or maintain their cars better over time. The folks at Automatic want to change all that, with a smart combination of hardware and mobile apps to keep people better informed of how their cars are doing.
Automatic investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund and Y Combinator, as well as a group of angels.

In addition to helping people spend less money on gas, the app also shows you why the check-engine light comes on (and permits users to turn it off), directs you to your parking spot and automatically calls 911 if you get into a collision. It also tracks the cost of every mile you drive, a calculation based on a continually updated stream of data of gas prices from stations across the country. All these functions came about after the founders realized what a device that could monitor fuel use can do, said Jariyasunant, a co-founder.

We saw Automatic in action on a little drive around the streets of New York City last week. Along with an iPhone app, the little dongle will track your gas mileage and remember where you parked. It'll also even give you a little notification if you're braking too hard or accelerating too fast. Why? These are apparently a couple of habits that make you use more gas than you need to. How are you driving? It'll give you personalized feedback every week in score from 1-100. And it tries to lookout for your car too. Engine light flips on? You can tap a notification to see what the issue is. If it's no big deal, you can turn the light off all from within the app. Or you can look up a nearby mechanic to get things sorted out. And god forbid you get in a wreck, Automatic will automatically of course call emergency responders and send texts to three numbers you pre-determined to let them know you're ok.

The past one year and three months has been an interesting time for me, and we have a great team in-place:

If you are interesting in the kind of things we are doing, we have open positions for engineers, so join us - we're looking for a Server engineer, iOS engineer, Android engineer and Firmware engineer - please get in touch with us at jobs@automatic.com or directly contact me if you're interested.

Forward

In the end, we have our eyes on only one thing: delivering on the promise the company's been making and I'm confident that Thejo will lead us there successfully. So after the launch frenzy, its heads down and back to work.